Bishop Tom Wright and Commonwealth Day

Top-rank New Testament Scholar and Bishop of Durham Tom Wright is in Australia. And Monday was Commonwealth Day at Sydney's St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral, the first time Her majesty the Queen attended Commonwealth Day Observance at Sydney's St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral instead of London's Westminster Abbey.

Transcript

Two leading figures of the Church of England are in Australia at the moment, Her Majesty the Queen, who is of course the Supreme Governor of the Church of England; and the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, who's one of the world's leading bible scholars. And they both feature in our program today.

FANFARE

Stephen Crittenden: Well Monday was Commonwealth Day at Sydney's St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral, the first time the Queen has attended the annual observance outside London's Westminster Abbey. How was the infinite religious and ethnic variety of the Commonwealth reflected in the heartland of Sydney evangelicalism? Well, with the assistance of the Protocol Department of the New South Wales Premier's Department, St Andrew's Cathedral saw a very inter-faith service indeed.

Noel Debien was there, and if you listen carefully, you might just hear him singing along.

Noel Debien: And even though Australia is one of 16 Commonwealth members who are constitutional monarchies, the republicans among us can also take heart, given that 32 members of the Commonwealth are already republics. Indeed it was India and Pakistan's republican independence that got the whole Commonwealth ball rolling.

LIVE INDIAN MUSIC/ RAJASTHANI DANCE

Noel Debien: The Rajasthani Dancers were another element in the ethnic quilt put together at Sydney Anglican headquarters. And while the Rajasthani Dance was ethnic, and not dedicated to a Hindu god, for the Australians there was uncharacteristically, an idol in the Anglican cathedral.

LIVE MUSIC: "The Prayer" (sung by Anthony Callea)text: Sognamo un mondo senza piu violenza/Un mondo di guistizia e do speranza/Ognuno dia la mano al suo vicino/ Simbolo di pace, di fraternitaWe dream of a world with no more violence/A world of justice and hope/Grasp your neighbor's hand/As a symbol of peace and brotherhood

Noel Debien: And Anthony Callea's prayer was not the only one to be heard: the Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen, led the rest of them.

Phillip Jensen: O God, the creator of all peoples, forgive our unnecessary divisions and prejudices. Change the hearts of all people so that each individual will be valued as your preacher, made in your image.

At this central point of our Commonwealth Day celebrations, we invite the representatives of some of the different religions within the Commonwealth to lead our gathering in six affirmations that express our shared values of the Commonwealth member countries.

Noel Debien: The Anglican Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen.

The observance was somewhat striking, as Muslim sheikhs, Buddhist monks, Roman Catholic bishops and Jewish community leaders represented the 53 member states of the Commonwealth. The Queen's own message as well as that of Archbishop Peter Jensen, gave particular prominence to the plight of people living with HIV and AIDS, 60% of the total living within the Commonwealth itself.

Peter Jensen: We remember the devastation amongst men, but we also realise that as a UN staffer said, 'AIDS has a woman's face', that for so many women their lives are mercilessly desperate. We see the world's AIDS orphans battling for survival, with so many in child-headed families after the loss of their parents to this dreadful scourge.

Noel Debien: The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen.

Well the observance came to an end as the newly-installed Director of Music at St Andrew's, Ross Cobb, demonstrated that the alleged impending demise of the Sydney Cathedral Choir has not occurred just yet, as they sang 'Let All the World in Every Corner Sing' by the very English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. They've rarely sung better; it was a religious experience.

LIVE MUSIC : Let All the World in Every Corner Sing (Ralph Vaughan William) perfomed by St Andrew's Cathedral choir and occasional orchestra

Stephen Crittenden: Well you can see someone was having fun. Noel Debien reporting from St Andrew's Cathedral, probably a more colourful experience at St Andrew's was not had since the funeral of Broughton Knox, I'm sure.

Well the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, or Tom Wright, is one of the world's leading New Testament scholars. And he's in Australia at the moment at the beginning of a whirlwind speaking tour hosted by among others the Society for the Study of Early Christianity, and the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre at Macquarie University.

I have interviewed Tom Wright before, in fact in 2004 I travelled to Durham to do so. This conversation really takes up where that conversation left off, the storm-clouds threatening to divide the Anglican communion which are never far away, and lots of conversation about the Bible.

Bishop Tom Wright, welcome to the program. Last time we spoke, I interviewed you in front of your huge gothic fireplace in your huge gothic castle just a couple of days before the release of the Eames Report on what the Anglican communion was going to do about homosexuality. At that time there were suggestions that the whole show was about to blow apart. It even seemed to some people that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, although a wonderful scholar, might not have the political skills to hold it all together.

Here we are, 18 months later, there's been no implosion, or explosion. Has the day of reckoning just been delayed? Has one side or the other given enough ground to prevent a blow-up, or is the Anglican communion already in schism, it's just not official yet?

Tom Wright: It's a hard question to answer, and by the way, nice to see you again and good to be back on the programme. Because in the church, as in many things in the world actually, things are never quite simple in the way that we would like to make them. Periods of history don't just happen, bang! there we are and we're in a new period. Things overlap. And what happened after the publication of the Windsor Report was that everyone took a deep breath and then started either to criticise it or to support bits of it, or to say, 'I wish you'd said this as well', whatever. So we've been through all that, but the Windsor Report was going to the meeting of the Anglican Primates the following February, that's a year ago now at Dromantine in Ireland. And they met and endorsed the Windsor Report and its recommendations, and on that basis, made certain provisions which enabled the Anglican communion to continue going as it was for the moment. Now not everyone is happy with the way those provisions have worked out, and that's a whole other story, but the key thing that's coming up right now is that there's a meeting of the Standing Committee, then the Consultative Council in a week or two's time, and that will have to give some thought and make some recommendations about invitations to the next Lambeth Conference. And in the meantime, in June, the American church, ECUSA, are going to be meeting for their general convention, and they will have before them the question as to whether they will endorse the Windsor Report, which would mean if they did, that they would have to apologise to the rest of the communion, not specifically on the issue of homosexuality, though many would want them to do that as well, but on the issue which is the presenting issue. It isn't what to do about homosexuality, it's what to do when one province, or one diocese says 'I understand the rest of you don't want to do this, but we're going to do it anyway', and the fact of a province claiming the right to act unilaterally when the other provinces have said 'We don't want you to do that'.

Stephen Crittenden: And homosexuality of course isn't the only issue.

Tom Wright: There are lots of issues which are bubbling up under the surface. At the moment, because of the peculiar configuration of the way the postmodern culture has worked, with the deconstruction of the old ways of doing society that we all knew, one of the sharp presenting issues which has come up within our culture, is the deconstruction of marriage, and the reconstruction of more free-floating relationships in which the male plus female thing is a kind of an incidental. And why not do male plus male, or female plus female, or indeed threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes whatever. I mean there's plenty of that going on in America as a kind of cultural mandate which people are following. And the church is finding it very difficult to hold its own in the middle of all of that.

Stephen Crittenden: Has the game been lost?

Tom Wright: I'm not sure what losing the game would mean, because the church at every period in history has faced crises, struggles, big issues which have threatened to tear things apart. I think it looks now as though a great many people in North America are absolutely determined to ignore what the rest of the community's saying, and say 'We're just going to do this, and if you don't like it, tough, we're off on our own'. If that means a loss, and it does mean a loss because that would mean part of the Anglican communion splitting off from the rest, then that is a tragedy, but it's actually been a tragedy waiting to happen for a very long time. Because there are many churches and ECUSA has been one of them, which have embraced a particular type of theology, which leads it further and further away from where most of the rest of the Anglican communion are. Of course they will tell it the other way, they would say that the Africans and others have embraced a kind of fundamentalism which leads them away from academic purity and respectability. As an academic myself I would be bound to disagree with that. But inevitably, in any family squabble, you get this kind of 'I said, you said, why did you say this?' etc., to and fro, and that's where we are right now. It's not pretty, but it is actually what family life is sometimes all about.

Stephen Crittenden: Last time we talked we didn't spend a great deal of time on St Paul. Lots of my Jewish friends are freaked out by St Paul. They don't have any problem with Jesus the great Jewish teacher, but they do have a problem with an even greater perhaps Jewish teacher who says 'Let's move on from Judaism'. I know lots of Catholics who are freaked out by St Paul as well. They say Paul, and especially Paul to the Romans, is waved in their faces like a kind of Protestant Qur'an, a kind of magic book with all the answers. Should St Paul freak us out?

Tom Wright: In a sense, St Paul ought always to freak us all out, Protestants included. Because St Paul is a bigger thinker than any of us have ever realised. I say in the preface to my recent book on Paul, that actually he's the kind of thinker of the stature of somebody like Plato or Aristotle, who just when we think we've got him tied down, he will laugh and dance across the room and say, 'Well what about this bit then?' And there's always more to him, and that's why he's such an exciting person to read. And the minute you think you've got him taped, 'Here are his central ideas, bang, bang, bang', you've made him boring, and Paul is never, ever boring. Now of course Jewish interlocutors - and I've had many, many conversations with Jewish friends and Jewish scholars that I've known, about Paul - Jewish scholars find Paul fascinating and frustrating, because he is deeply Jewish. He isn't in that sense moving away from Judaism in the sense of inventing a non-Jewish religion. Paul is absolutely soaked in Judaism. But he is soaked in a Judaism seen through the filter of a crucified and risen Messiah, and that means that he says Judaism has to change. Well actually he says 'God is transforming what it means to be a genuine Jew' and that's the really, really, scary thing because he now says anyone can join. A non-Jew can be just as welcome in the family of God as a Jew. But this for Paul, is paradoxically a very deeply Jewish thing to say. Because you'll notice that one of the most striking traditions that authentic Judaism has is critique from within, whether it's new rabbinic movements or different teachers or Shabbatai Zvi or whoever it is, critique from within is part of the maturity and wisdom of genuine Judaism. And Jesus believed I think, that he was offering a critique from within. John the Baptist certainly did, and I think that's exactly where Paul is too. So I would say to Jews who are worried by Paul, 'Well you do well to be worried because he is an explosive thinker. He isn't a tame thinker, you can't just invite him into the house and expect him not to rattle the teacups a bit.' But when you stick with him, you will see that he really does believe that this is the true fulfillment of what the promises to Abraham and so on, and the Law of Moses, were really all about. And to Catholics I would say 'Let's grow up together in our reading of the New Testament. Paul is just as much a Catholic thinker as he is a Protestant thinker. I taught a course on St Paul in the Gregorian University in Rome four years ago, and I found nothing but excitement for understanding more of what this great man is all about. We Protestants belittle Paul, the Catholics have marginalised him, the Jews are afraid of him, let's just get together and read the man again, and we'll find that he'll lead us all forward.

Stephen Crittenden: You've just written a great big book on the Resurrection, and I take it that you believe that the Resurrection of Jesus was a physical resurrection. Presumably Christianity would never have taken off as a religion in the first place if the early Christians had not believed that it as a physical resurrection. But does Christianity still, in 2006, rise or fall on whether or not it's a physical resurrection?

Tom Wright: Let's be quite clear. The word 'resurrection' in the ancient world, the Greek word 'anastasis' always referred to something that we would call a physical resurrection. That is to say, the word 'resurrection' was never a kind of synonym for life after death, or a spiritual survival, or 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, while his soul goes marching on'. The ancient world was full of theories about bodies mouldering in graves and souls being off somewhere else, and that is not resurrection. It never was. The Greeks and Romans who explicitly disbelieved in resurrection. I should say we're sitting in a room with Greek and Roman texts around the wall as we're doing this recording, and many of the authors on these walls, Greek and Roman writers, when they face the idea of resurrection they say, 'Well we've heard silly stories about this sort of thing, but we all know it doesn't happen, dead people stay dead'. Aeschylus said that, Pliny said that, Homer said that. What they meant always involved bodies. It's only in the late 2nd century and thereafter that some people who are trying to put together Christianity with bits of pagan philosophy, used the language of resurrection but mean a kind of spiritual survival. And that is a new innovation in the late 2nd century AD. It's certainly not what the early Christians were all about.

The point about Christianity is that it's not just a new religious teaching or new ethical teaching, it's certainly not a new way to go to heaven when you die, it's that God's new world has broken into the present one through Jesus of Nazareth. It's the God who is the creator that we're talking about, and Christianity is about new creation in and through Jesus. Dealing with the problems of the old - that's what the Atonement is all about - and launching God's new creation. Now if you say that the body of Jesus stayed in the tomb, and that the disciples were aware of a spiritual presence of Jesus somewhere, then what you're saying is this is just a local variation on a new kind of spirituality. It's certainly not a new creation. The point about the resurrection is not that it's an isolated, odd miracle, in which God does strange conjuring tricks with bones - as one of my distinguished predecessors in Durham once said. The point about Christianity is that it's the moment when, through Jesus, the creator God launches the project of new creation and says, 'OK, guys, come on in.'

Stephen Crittenden: My guest is the Bishop of Durham and New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright. Take a big breath, let's plunge back in.

I read somewhere recently you saying that you believe that there is much stronger eye-witness content in the gospels, than prevailing academic views tend to believe.

Tom Wright: My colleague and friend, Richard Bauckham, who's Professor at St Andrew's University, is about to publish (it may already be out in the last few weeks, I'm not sure) a book on the Gospels as eye witness testimony, and Richard knows far more than most of the rest of us about the nature of 1st and 2nd century historiography and the Christian subculture in that time, and all of that. And he's gone into great detail about the way in which the stories we have in the Gospels are told with particular people referred to, particular names being mentioned, particular locations. And he makes a very strong case that when the early traditions told a story, with a reference to a particular person dropped in, one of the things they were doing was saying 'This story, as it were, belongs to that person in the sense that he's the one who can tell you, or she's the one who can tell you about it, and if you want to know the detail, they're still around, you can go and check up on them.' And that sense of the Gospels as bristling with eye-witness reference, is something that most scholars screened out 100 years ago, with Rudolf Bultmann, a great German scholar at Marburg in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Because of course Bultmann didn't want the Gospels to be eye-witness testimony, because he wanted the Gospels for reasons of his own religion and philosophy, he wanted the Gospels to be simply witnesses to the later faith of the church. And so he read out of them all that eye-witness stuff, got rid of that, and went in the other direction. And I think what we're now seeing - rooted in serious ancient history which Bultman at that stage wasn't - what we're now seeing is a turn towards people saying that was actually a mistake. The whole Bultmannian movement 100 years ago towards demythologisation was simply a misapprehension. Early Christianity was not like that, it really was rooted in what real people said, that their memories were incidents they'd taken part in.

Stephen Crittenden: Hilaire Belloc said that as far as he was concerned the Old Testament was nothing more than a bunch of Yiddish folk tales. Why do Christians still bother with the Hebrew bible? When we spoke last time, you talked about the way that the gospel authors saw Jesus as the fulfillment of a long Jewish story. But can that Jewish story realistically still be a story of Christians in Australia in 2006?

Tom Wright: Trying to get the message of the New Testament without the Old Testament is trying to make a tree stand up without a root system. Many Christians ignore the Old Testament and profit still from the fact that this tree is still flowering and bearing fruit. But in fact if you try cutting off that root system, you'll find the tree falls down dead pretty soon.

Now it's therefore worth exploring the root system. Even though it isn't where we now live, it is the roots of what we now inherit. Particularly I would say, the creation story. I don't mean it in the literalistic sense, but the idea that a good God made this world and made it good, and that it is a good place for humans to be. That is absolutely foundational. Or take the story of Abraham. You cannot understand Paul's theology or John's theology, without seeing that the promises that God made to Abraham are promises that God would heal the whole world through his people Israel, and that these promises are the ones that have come to fruition in Jesus. Or take the beginning of John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and was God. And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent, tabernacled among us". Unless you understand the beginning of Genesis, about in the beginning and the creation, and unless you understand about God pitching his tent, the image of the tabernacle, the tabernacle where God dwelt with his people in the wilderness and so on, then you might get the impression that the incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus was a very non-Jewish, or even anti-Jewish idea. The whole point of the Johannine Prologue is that this is a deeply and richly Jewish idea which grows directly out of the wisdom traditions, the word traditions, the tabernacle traditions, in Judaism itself.

So I mean, I live in the Old Testament, it's not my primary teaching subject, but I read scripture every day - of course I do - and one of my favourite bits in reading scripture every day is to read the Old Testament in Hebrew, and it resources me richly again and again and again.

Stephen Crittenden: Mainstream Christians don't accept the Book of Mormon as inspired scripture, or Joseph Smith as a prophet sent to the whole world. They see it as a very interesting historical document that Mormons have decided is a message for them. Given that there's a lot of positive talk at the moment about Judaism and Christianity and Islam as the three Abrahamic faiths all sharing the same God and a common ancestry, given that Christians do accept the Hebrew Bible as you've just been talking about, and all the Jewish prophets, what is the status of Muhammad and the Qur'an for Christians? Is Muhammad part of the same pantheon as Moses and Elijah, or is the Qur'an like the Book of Mormon? If Jews and Christians share the same story, are Muslims part of that story?

Tom Wright: The answer has to be yes and no. And I'm interested in the parallel with the Book of Mormon, because actually I think the Qur'an is an extraordinary, powerful, full of insight sort of document, even though there are lots of bits of it which would curl such hair as I've got left. Whereas the Book of Mormon I think is just not in the same world at all. I wouldn't wish to insult Muslims by suggesting that it was. I'm not a specialist in the Book of Mormon, so I haven't studied it intensely.

The nub of this has to do with being part of the different families of Abraham as it were, and Abraham has Ishmael and Isaac and then Isaac's children, Jacob, and Esau, and so the tale goes on. And unless we understand that bit of the Old Testament, we can't understand our own roots. But the nub of it is really the question as to whether we are meaning the same thing by the word "God". Whether the "Allah" of the Muslim, is actually the same as the God who is the father of Jesus Christ. Because classical Islam has said very, very definitely, 'There is one God and he does not have a son'. And classical Islam has said very definitely that Jesus of Nazareth is a prophet but he did not die on a cross, and he was not raised from the dead. Now those are not little incidentals to Christianity, and it isn't just that there are things Christians believe happened to Jesus. They are defining things, by which we know who the Father of Jesus is. The Father of Jesus is the one who we see revealed in the Son who dies and rises again. So we actually know the meaning of the word God by looking at Jesus.

Now the Muslim says, 'No, we know the meaning of the word God by looking at the Qur'an, and in a sense the Qur'an takes the place in Islam of Jesus in Christianity. It's the incarnation of the Word, the enfleshment of the Word, if you like. So it is open question and I remember talking with some Palestinian Christian leaders when I was in Israel a few years ago who said, 'Listen, the Muslims are our neighbours, they're our friends, we know them, we're on the street with them, we're on good terms with them. But it's quite clear to us that their Allah is not the same god that we worship as the God revealed in Jesus.' Now that's very shocking to some people who say 'It's very intolerant you should say that.' But actually this is simply being deeply true to the depth structure of Islam and Christianity.

Now the question as between Jews and Christians is of a different order, actually. Because there are many Jews who live with their Torah and with its rabbinic extrapolation and so on, but whose deep Torah faith is actually much more recognisable to a Christian - and sometimes the reverse is true as well - than many Muslim with either Jews or Christians. Because Islam has got all sorts of other bits which Jews both recognise and don't recognise, and similarly for Christians. So it isn't just that we're all three branches on the same stem. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are different sorts of things. And that's part of the difficulty about our wretched word 'religion', which ever since the 18th century has been used as a label to stick on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, etc., as though they were simply all variants on the same thing. And when you actually look at them, they're not. They're different kinds of animals entirely.

Stephen Crittenden: You've said that you're an Anglican because you were brought up as an Anglican. Is there any other reason why you're an Anglican or why you would want to commend Anglicanism to anybody who was thinking of joining?

Tom Wright: In a sense I'm an Anglican because I was brought up there. But there are millions of people who are brought up as Anglicans and who've moved away either into atheism or agnosticism, or into Catholicism in one direction, or Orthodoxy, or into being a Baptist or a Pentecostal or whatever. So just being brought up in it isn't a sufficient reason for staying there. And there have been times in my life when I've looked at what was going on in the Church of England and I've just thought, 'Do I really belong there?' And in world-wide Anglicanism as well. In a sense it's like a family, and you can't leave your - well you can and you can't leave your family - I mean you can turn your back on them but they're still around somewhere, as it were. But it's more than that. I do think that the Anglican Church worldwide has a peculiar vocation at the moment, that we are within touching distance of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, even though we have some unresolved issues with them. We are within touching distance of Methodism and Presbyterianism and so on, and Anglicanism is often seen both from inside and from outside, as a place where people can come and get to know each other and actually work together. I was at a colloquium recently in the north of England where we had Anglicans, Romans, Orthodox, Methodist, Reformed etc., and there was a strong sense that actually the Anglican ministry within the worldwide larger church is one of providing a place where people can meet, a place where people can pray, and that's an uncomfortable place. It's like living in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. But it's a place which has a certain integrity and which I hope and pray still has a mission to perform within the purposes of God.

Stephen Crittenden: Another stimulating conversation. Thank you for being on the program, and enjoy your time in Australia.

Tom Wright: Thank you very much, I am already and look forward to doing some more.

Thanks to Jenny Parsonage and Noel Debien. I'm Stephen Crittenden, well we've got a few moments in hand, so please be upstanding just one more time, and listen out for Noel Debien, his fruity tenor sailing across the top.